Techincolor
by Lois Fogg
Summary: Veronica and Logan struggle back to each other. Sequel to A Feather's Weight.


Title: Technicolor  
Author: Lois Fogg (Utsusemia on LJ)   
Pairing/Character: Logan/Veronica  
Word Count: About 6,900  
Rating: R (some language)  
Summary: Veronica and Logan struggle back to each other. Sequel to A Feather's Weight.  
Spoilers: AU from 2.16. You probably should read A Feather's Weight (http/ first.  
Warnings: None

Some notes (the rest at the bottom): So yeah, I wrote a sequel.

"Okay, question."

"Shoot."

"How much do you want to live?"

"Depends on the day."

"Right now?"

"Not so much."

He smiles and holds out a single white cube. It catches the light in unsettling ways, so she can see the rough surface with almost too much clarity. She thinks that there must be colors deep within it, but all she can see is white.

"Open your mouth."

"What is it?" It looks nothing like the fistful of dirt she gorged on earlier--an ending with a chaser of clarity.

His smile is understanding, his eyes are sad. She looks, but she can't see any blame.

It's almost too much of a relief.

"What you wanted," he says.

She holds out her tongue. He places the cube in her mouth.

It dissolves--sweet, bitter, cobalt blue and Logan brown (she _knew_ there were colors), and his eyes are steady on hers. She wishes he would hold her hand, lick the fluorescent stickiness from her lips, but she just says, "Thank you."

He's still smiling.

--------------------------------------------

He has it on good authority that a cane officially makes him about ten times hotter (no word yet on the sling, apparently). Well, if Madison Sinclair via Dick counts as a good authority. Which, considering some of the girls at this school, he is willing to believe. He moves slowly because he has to, but he's discovered a certain rhythm to his enforced pace that he paradoxically enjoys. Step, cane, step, grimace, pause, repeat. It gives him an excuse to stare, to notice things. It's a pace almost taunting in its slowness, forcing people to wait behind him, to mark his passage like a peasant to a king. Everyone stares at him anyway--he cares even less than he did before about what they think. The looks, the rumors they sprinkle in his wake are worse than when his mother killed herself e hdh  
and his father was arrested. He wonders why, but he supposes that this time there's more mystery about the circumstances. He's certainly not about to say anything, and if Molly has been a lot quieter lately, no one ever bothered to notice her anyway.

Of course, maybe they just stare at him the way bystanders stare at mob hits--horrified and ghoulishly fascinated. Logan Echolls, voted "Most Likely to Die Before the Age of 25" by his senior class.

Ten minutes late, he limps leisurely into Mr. Wu's study hall. Wu avoids his eyes and makes an awkward gesture for him to sit down, which Logan finds equal parts gratifying and disturbing. The girl who carried his books down the hall for him smiles hopefully before leaving to join her friends. He should thank her but he doesn't, because all that vicodin only allows for so much maintaining, and she'll have enough to gossip about anyway.

_She_ isn't here yet. Which is strange, because he's started going extra slow to study hall just so he can judge her expression when he walks in. It's a little masochistic, really, because every time, like old fucking faithful, she flinches. Veronica Mars, she who eats nails for breakfast and bullshit for dessert, she who only flinches when buses full of schoolchildren sail off cliffs or psychopaths (a.k.a. Daddy) point guns at her--_she_ flinches when he walks into the room. What does she think he can do to her? Smack her with his cane? He grimaces at the thought--she'd have to help him up off the floor afterwards. He looks over at Wallace, who, thank god, looks back at him coolly. No wary, deferential treatment there.

"Where's Veronica?" he asks.

Wallace shakes his head. "Left after lunch. Said she had to find something."

It's been three weeks, but he still isn't sure what she's looking for. Half of him wants to help her find it--but he flinches, too, when he sees her. His elbow aches and his dick gets hard and so he pops a few more pills. Because he can. Because he knows she's watching.

--------------------------------------------

"Why doesn't cotton candy come in more colors? Pink or blue. It's so toddler."

He rips off a piece from his puff--bubblegum pink, just to flaunt the stereotype--and holds it in front of her mouth. The fluff crystallizes just around his fingers into a deeper, crunchy magenta. It's like a whole new universe of color to her heightened senses, and she laughs.

"See?" he says. "There's always more than you think. Every color hides a rainbow."

She rolls her eyes, but relishes in the slow collapse of sugar filaments between his warm fingers. She can almost hear them sinking. "Very after school special, Logan," she says. "Why _can't_ we all get along?"

He drops the half-crushed spun sugar in her mouth, but his fingers never brush her lips. The taste of the candy is almost as good as his touch, at least for now. It slides down her tongue, and the lingering stain tastes like a carousel calliope, a slightly out-of-tune hand organ.

She gasps and opens her eyes to look in Logan's. A brown so self-aware, so aloof. Did his eyes always whisper like that? She wishes he would touch her, so she could understand what they're saying.

"Holy shit," she says, slowly. "What the hell did you give me?"

"You asked for it."

"I'm...not sure I want it anymore."

"That's usually how it works."

He's walking away from her already, further down the boardwalk. Frantic, she drops her cotton candy and hurries after him. Behind her, a kid shouts "Look mommy, purple cotton candy!"

And when she turns back to look she sees it is, after all.

--------------------------------------------

He's thought a lot--too much--about how she felt, what she did, those three hours before she decided to save him. Did she think of him at all? Did her guilt build slowly or drown her like a tidal wave?

When did she realize she had left him to die?

Even if he had the chance to ask her (even if she would answer), he isn't sure he wants to know. He's afraid the truth is worse than anything he could imagine. It's hard enough loving someone who tried to kill you. It might be worse knowing how long it took her to decide it was a bad idea.

But this time he has no frame of reference. Veronica doesn't just take off from school unless it's something very important. Something that generally involves an unhealthy amount of extortion and death. His own, for example. Only now, he realizes he hasn't exchanged a word with her in three weeks and she could be investigating the Columbian drug mob, for all he'd know of it. He thinks of her exhausted face, her cheeks painfully hollow from the weight she shouldn't have lost, and realizes what he should have known all long: she's lost her sense of self-preservation.

And the corollary to that? Yes, even a double dose of vicodin and a turgid, miasmic background of pain lets this one through: she's willing to die. She might even want it.

The deduction?

Slowly--because even now, there's no other fucking way, and Jesus someone had better kill him before he gets old (maybe twenty-five isn't such a bad age after all)--he stands.

Wu looks up and has to open his mouth a few times before he manages to get out, "Leaving us, Mr. Echolls?"

"I've forgotten something."

--------------------------------------------

The carousel is old, weather-beaten, not a little frightening. It's been at this end of the boardwalk for as long as she can remember, even though it's nominally one of those portable rides that travel the country from one suburban hell-hole to another, gouging customers as they go. The rusting gears and hinges--from the remaining chips of paint, she can see they had once been bright cherry red--groan when they start another fully-loaded ride. The dangling baskets--rust brown, with hints of bright colors lurking just beneath--sway at each jolt. The sight makes Veronica a little sick to her stomach, but the kids just giggle, and the teenagers who aren't making out lean out over the side in varying states of blissful chemical highs.

Even the bits of colors that remain on the ancient monstrosity seem to vibrate and deepen if she stares at them for too long. So she looks away and stares at the shoulder of his olive green shirt. She knows that shirt, knows just how it smells like overpriced organic laundry detergent and his own pungent sweetness. It's soft because he wears it all the time--his favorite, but he let her wear it once, when they came back from the beach and her clothes were soaked with saltwater. She wants to rest her head in that perfect hollow beneath his collarbone, to just give in and take what she's wanted for so long, but the thought makes her strangely nervous, too. There's something she seems to be forgetting, a reason why she doesn't deserve it.

And, of course, he doesn't want her to.

They walk forward in line and Logan hands two dull red and black cardboard tickets to the ride operator.

"Do we have to do this?" Veronica asks, nervousness giving way to panic.

When he turns to her, he looks amused, but his eyes are hissing like knives scraped against stone.

"What, even _this_ isn't normal enough for you? Sorry, Veronica, we're a little young for picket fences."

"That's not what I mean--" She stops. His eyes are cutting her, but they're drawing grief, not blood.

"That's always been your thing, hasn't it? Honesty."

The operator impatiently rattles the door to their carriage and Logan climbs in ahead of her. He doesn't offer his hand.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she says, as the ride groans and lurches forward and they leave the safety of the ground. "Liking the truth is a bad thing, now? But maybe you _do_ have the answer. Just lie to everyone and make them hate you."

He lounges against the back of the seat, his right hand resting lightly on the locked door. She stares at it, wondering what seems so off, why her throat feels warm and painful, like she's about to cry.

"I've never gotten why they call it '_self_-righteousness,'" he says, when they've neared the top of the ride. The sun burns her skin, but if she squints, she can see miles down the beach. "It's got nothing to do with you, does it? It's always about everyone else. Is your own mind such a scary place?"

"I..." she can't seem to form a coherent sentence. She doesn't understand what he's talking about. Or she doesn't want to? She starts to shake as she stares at him--anywhere but his face, but the sheer physicality of his presence, that feeling she can't shake of something being _not right_ starts to overwhelm her.

"But prove me wrong, Veronica," he says softly. "Tell me. Honestly--how do you feel about me?"

The carousel seems to have stopped up here. Technical difficulties? She can't concentrate enough to tell.

"You're a jackass," she says, her voice too loud.

He just smiles. "You have to do better than that."

"I...I don't--" Snatches of a memory, she's not sure which, fill her mind. Something about a bathroom and guilt so overpowering...

Logan leans very close, so his forehead is separated from hers by less than an inch. But he still won't touch her. She's scared because she might be remembering why.

"Right now. How do you feel about me? Hold yourself to the same fucking standard, for once."

Every color hides a rainbow. Like Logan's eyes--black and blood red, so clear in their violent, triumphant rage. She wondered when she would see him like this again--awake and screaming. Of course, crippling pain and vicodin tend to dampen edges, even the ones she longs for.

The carriage rocks gently in a passing breeze. She knows there must be noise, but all she can hear is his clear, unencumbered breathing.

Oh, god.

Faster and faster, like water finally overpowering the final levee, the memories flood back.

Dirt roads and bloody seats, emergency rooms, surgery...and a car, a highway, a burst of stolen ecstasy...

"No, _no_. That didn't happen. It couldn't have. I couldn't--"

She forced him to have sex with her. He passed out. Too much pain. There always was.

Logan smiles. "Oh yes. You did."

Her cell phone rings, but she doesn't answer it.

"Honesty's a bitch, huh?"

His hands are tauntingly close. She knows why he won't touch her. "I love you," she says.

"So is that."

--------------------------------------------

He can't drive. Which vaguely bothered him before, when he had bigger things to worry about, but is rapidly becoming the number two thing most fucked up about his life. He thought about asking Dick, but his sole remaining candidate for best friend is only manageable in small doses. He doesn't know how long this will take--and of course Veronica still has the power to scare him. In the end, he calls a cab and waits in front of the school, glaring at anyone who stares longer than three seconds. He times it, actually. He figures three seconds is a decent, fair amount of time to indulge voyeuristic curiosity. Anything more than that is just tacky.

He goes to her house, first, just to make sure. Her car isn't in the driveway and no one answers when he knocks on the door (and it occurs to him that risking braving her father in his condition might be the bravest thing he's ever done). Her car isn't outside her dad's office, either. The driver seems annoyed when Logan tells him to wait in the lot, but a fifty dollar bill makes him considerably more patient.

He had hoped this would be easy. That she would be some place expected and he could just curse himself for being stupid, as usual. But he knew her. Better than her psychotic father, in some ways, and everything about this made the darker parts of him wonder if he would still be seeing her _alive_, let alone okay. She has been spiraling for weeks--he's known it, even if she managed to maintain for everyone else. But he couldn't bring himself to talk to her. After that night on the phone...she has so many people who love her. He told himself he wasn't stupid enough to be her savior.

Except, apparently, he is that stupid, because why else would he be crammed uncomfortably into the back of a cab, searching Neptune for a girl who is the reason why he can't drive in the first place?

"Why did you decide to live?" she asked, that night on the phone. He couldn't sleep. He could barely move. One type of agony was at least more interesting than the other. When had they ever had a conversation so raw, so clear of barbs and walls?

Nothing to stop him from answering, "You opened the door."

_You held me. You tried to protect me_. Even then, not everything could be said. Even then, he realized how easy it would be to fall the other way, tumble off the bridge.

He dials her number.

--------------------------------------------

"You aren't real, are you?"

"Hmm...loaded question. Not real, like your emotional honesty? Or, not real like flying unicorns?"

His voice smells like tar, hot enough to burn.

"Synesthesia," she says, slowly. "What you gave me--"

"You did it to yourself. How many times do I have to tell you?"

His right arm flexes like it always did before, like it longs for something to hit, even when there's no target in sight.

"You're okay," she says. "So you can't be real."

He smiles. "Boy, you're smart. How did my father ever fool you?"

Her phone keeps ringing. She tries to reach into her bag for it, but her hand can't seem to make contact with the canvas. The distance recedes and diminishes with no apparent pattern. The bag giggles.

"But maybe I'm dead," he says, low into her ear. "Maybe I accidentally overdosed on pain pills and now I'm here to haunt you forever for what you did."

Fuck. Goddamn it, why won't that phone stop ringing? Why can't she get into her bag? "You..._Logan_ would never do that." Her voice is shaking--another thing to hate.

"Oh, I get it, you think I still love you, don't you? You think I'll forgive you? You think I don't hate you?"  
Her sob is blue, of course, streaked with black, and it falls to the floor of the carriage. She stares at it as she reaches for her bag again, and this time, she finally feels the worn canvas--slightly damp, for some reason. Inside, wet sand clings to her fingers, but she finds the phone. It starts to ring again as soon as she picks it up. She tries to read the number, but the display twists before her eyes and she can't make it out. Logan leans back and sighs.

"Oh, pick it up already. I should have known he would do this."

"Hello?" she says. Her voice, amplified by the phone, is swimming with blue. She wonders if anyone will notice.

"Veronica?"

She knows that voice. Logan--_not_-Logan--crosses his arms, looks at her like a dare.

"Where the hell are you?"

Where the hell is she?

--------------------------------------------

He's in his hotel room when he finally gets through to her. He couldn't think of a better place to go and, anyway, his bottle is empty. He needs reinforcements. It only takes "Hello" for his fears to be confirmed. Her voice is too tentative, already close to tears. She's given up all thought of maintaining.

"Where the hell are you?" he asks, walking too quickly to his bedroom.

But she doesn't answer. He can hear her breathing on the phone. She's panicked about something, and anything bad enough to panic Veronica more than enough to worry about. There's weird noises in the background. Something scratching against the phone, something squeaking.

"You're in trouble. Tell me where you are, I'll come."

At least she doesn't ask him what good he could possibly do. She doesn't say anything. Her breathing sounds as loud as the ocean.

"Veronica, _please_." And he swore he would never again show her that much longing.

Something is strange about his bedroom. Like the maid forgot to clean it, except the bed is perfectly neat and the litter of ashes and roaches from his and Dick's pot binge last night are gone. Instead, his drawers are open, his shirts haphazard. He isn't surprised when he sees the one by his bed bare of everything but a Gideon bible. His last bottle is gone--so much for reinforcements. And his other treasure, a plastic bag filled with a $400-an-ounce treat for desperate times...empty. Crumbs are scattered over the floor. Like dirt, unless you know what it is.

She's still on the phone, still breathing. "You were here," he says, slowly. The vicodin's missing. Why would she take that? Why would she gorge on a thousand dollars of psychedelic mushrooms?

He starts to shiver and falls, hard, against the wall. His choked gasp seems to rouse her.

"You're not okay." She sounds disappointed, as if she hoped he would be.

"And I wonder why not?" he snaps. He knows even as he says it that he shouldn't, but pain is difficult to censor.

"I know you won't forgive me."

"I didn't--"

But she's hung up.

--------------------------------------------

It's like an explosion when he falls. The colors that swirled out of the phone are almost too bright, too jarring to look at.

"Imagine that every moment of every day," Not-Logan says, his face distorted by the garish colors. "And that's not the worst of what you did to him."

"You're not okay," she says, weirdly disappointed.

"And I wonder why not?" More colors, and something deep underneath. Turgid, bile yellow and bruised purple, sour as...

"Betrayal," Not-Logan says.

"I know you won't forgive me."

"I didn't--" His voice is sharp, desperate, urgent.

"Hang up," Not-Logan says.

She does.

"You know what you have to do, don't you?"

The sound of the ocean is louder. Her pants feel wet. She reaches into her bag (it's staying still this time) and pulls out the orange bottle.

"Where is all this sand coming from?" she asks.

"Tsk, tsk, what happened to your powers of observation, Mars?"

She looks at him, and then the carriage, carefully. He's not real. So it's possible this ride isn't, either. The ocean's too loud for the boardwalk. And they haven't moved in ages. She closes her eyes and concentrates. Yes, whatever she's sitting on, it's too soft to be a seat. And she's not actually moving, it's only her inner ear, off balance. The sand is everywhere because it's beneath her fingers, her thighs...

She opens her eyes.

She's on the beach. The carousel spins on the boardwalk behind her.

She looks around for not-Logan, but he's disappeared, and she's all alone with her bottle.

--------------------------------------------

His first thought--honest to fucking god, he couldn't make this one up if he tried--is to ask Veronica. He's shit at this whole sleuthing business. He knows it. Whenever something is wrong, his first instinct is to find Veronica, then beat someone up. Only this time, if he's going to beat anyone up, it ought to be himself. And he thinks Liam probably did a good enough job of that one for at least the next ten years.

So, how does she do it? How does she gather clues and casual statements and telling details until she solves the puzzle? He can't even do the fucking daily crossword, how can he be expected to figure out where Veronica is--hallucinating, terrified, possibly suicidal? No, he will _not_ fall over again.

Start from the beginning. The pain is starting to translate into a migraine right behind his eyes, but he thinks he does a decent bid for normal when he goes to talk to the concierge. His questions are simple: Did she come to my room? When did she leave? Did she say where she was going?

Yes. About an hour before. No, but he assumed she'd be going back to school.

Why?

Because she seemed like she was in a hurry.

He gets back in the car and greases the cabbie with another fifty. In a hurry? She'd just gorged on a bag of shrooms. Maybe she was trying to get somewhere before they kicked in. So wherever she went, it couldn't have been that far away. Good, that almost sounded like a deduction, Sherlock. So what's close by? What's a good place to...whatever, do something painful and stupid and self-destructive.

He can almost hear her: _Well, you're the resident expert on _that_, Logan._ Okay, so ignoring how unfair and one-sided (but true?) that assessment of him is, where would he go? A club, maybe, some place expensive. But only for a little bit of a kick. For something bigger...the bridge, of course. But that's his hang-up, not hers. No, he'd go someplace beautiful, someplace where the happy can at least temper the bitter.

Her breathing was as loud as the ocean.

Jesus, he almost smiles.

--------------------------------------------

_Every color hides..._

She remembers learning in physics class how, with paint, combining all colors results in black (or really, a muddy, grungy brown), but with light something else happens entirely. You can only make white light by combing every other color in exact proportions. White light _is_ a rainbow.

She can see it in the little pill. It pulses in time with her heart--inviting colors like olive and dun brown. She can still smell him, but he hasn't returned. She knows why she wants him back. Not-Logan is cruel, but at least he doesn't ignore her. At least she hasn't hurt him.

"If I take this, will you be there?" she asks the air. No one hears her. The beach is almost empty and it's getting chilly.

She will do this to Wallace. She will do this to her father. She knows that they should hate her forever for it. But she's _tried_ living with herself, with this new knowledge of what she's capable of, how he can't forgive her. She gives up. Yes, it makes what she did before even worse. Yes, it means she's weak. Yes, she's sickened by her very existence.

"Will you be there?" she asks again, very softly.

Because this downward spiral can only end in a rainbow.

--------------------------------------------

As soon as he gets there he realizes how big it all is, how little a chance he has of finding her. Is she on the boardwalk or the beach? The waves were loud, but he heard weird squeaks and groans, too, like the gears on one of the ancient rides. Maybe that narrows it down. Maybe if he just sits and thinks and refrains from cursing her for taking his fucking vicodin he can figure out where she is.

"Fucking bitch," he mutters, just because it feels nice to let something out, ease the frantic pressure in his head.

"Knew it had to be a girl," the cabbie says, as though Logan gave him permission to speak. "Ran off with your shit, broke your heart. Happened to me, too, kid. You get over it."

"Not if I don't find her," he says, although he didn't mean to.

The guy turns around and leans over the back of his seat. Clearly, extra cash makes him friendly. He should have known.

"And you think she's here?"

Oh, why not. "Boardwalk or the beach. I'm not sure."

"Why's that?"

"I called her. I thought I heard the ocean and one of those boardwalk death traps squeaking in the background."

"She didn't tell you where she was?"

"Would I be sitting here, talking to you if she had?"

The cabbie shrugs, and then adjusts his baseball cap like he's considering. "You can't really hear the waves from the boardwalk. Not loud enough to get over a cell phone, anyway. And the only ride loud enough to hear from the beach is that carousel. She'll be around there."

Logan stares at him. "And you know that because..."

The guy smiles like he just ate a fucking canary. "Used to work the carousel. Damn thing was so loud it gave me nightmares."

Logan opens the door and tries not to grimace as he levers himself upright.

"Wait for me. This might take a while," he says, when he's finally standing.

The cabbie looks skeptical. "You're in pretty rough shape, kid. Sure you're up to this?"

Logan feels his mouth stretch into a particularly savage, self-derisive smile. "Oh, you know what they say. Mind over matter."

He turns to look at the old wooden staircase that leads to the beach.

He'd say fuck her to hell, only he's very afraid that she's taking care of that herself.

--------------------------------------------

At first, the pill is like a cloud of white, breaking into colors and coalescing beneath her. Then everything turns dark, and she finds herself standing in the parking lot at the Neptune Grand. What the hell, she thinks, since when is vicodin the ghost of Christmas past? But the phone starts to ring and here she is, reliving that conversation she can't forget anyway.

"Logan?" her then-self said. She was sitting in the car with a bloodstain so fresh she could smell it, holding that little orange bottle in her hand. She was hopeful, like he might ask her to come back. Like he might save her.

Stupid, Veronica thinks.

"How do you feel about yourself? Right now, I mean."

She didn't know that voices had colors then, but now she sees that his is braided with agony. Both kinds--bright and garish, bruised and turgid. Her betrayal was fresh, then, but it hasn't grown less painful with time.

"I...Logan, what do you want me to say?"

His anger was like a punch from the phone. "That you're a terrible person? That you hate yourself?"

"I hate myself."

What a strange color. Veronica realizes that she's never seen her own voice before, but it's shot through with black veins that choke her other colors like killer vines and twist them in unnatural directions. Guilt, of course. She should have known it would choke her.

He seemed thrown by how easily she conceded. "Maybe...I didn't mean that," he said, far more gently.

"I don't want your forgiveness, Logan." Except she did.

"I'm not forgiving you."

A near-fatal blow.

"Why did you decide to live, Logan?"

He's silent for nearly a minute. And then, "Because you opened the door."

But he had closed his. Still, she decided to try.

When she hung up the phone, she didn't realize he had already dealt the killing wound. She sees now that it's just taken her three weeks to die.

She swallows another.

--------------------------------------------

He isn't sure he's ever going to enjoy the beach again. Not if every time he looks at sand he remembers this fun-filled journey into hell, where his leg and ribs have started to hurt so badly he thinks he might need to call the paramedics before he even finds her. She's not even that far up the beach, which is hilarious. Or pathetic, depending on your viewpoint. He calls her again, but he doesn't expect an answer. With that many shrooms, it might be hours before she comes down.

He isn't going to think about the vicodin.

He considers calling her father, when he finally comes in view of the carousel. On the one hand, if something has happened, he should know. On the other, if she really did just get magnificently high on shrooms and...brought along his overdose-friendly pain meds by accident (_accident_? Jesus, when did he get so hopeless?), he'd just make a bad situation worse. And even at his current pace, her father couldn't possibly reach her faster. So he keeps the phone in his pocket, he keeps stumbling forward.

It's chilly, and there's no one out here but the occasional dog walker.

So when he sees someone sitting on the beach, the encroaching tide creeping beneath her legs, he would know even without a burst of relief so visceral he almost loses his balance that he's found her.

--------------------------------------------

Pill number two takes her far above Neptune. A flock of seagulls pass her, floating aimlessly, and she's caught up in their wake.

"Only ten percent of the matter in the universe is the stuff we can see," says the head gull, wheeling around the others. "Electrons, quarks, fermions, bosons, even light itself!" He raises a wing and the light radiates off of it in colors that hurt her eyes.

"Everything we can see, hear, feel, touch, think, smell...it's only ten percent of the universe!"

"What's the rest?" another gull asks.

The leader laughs and they swoop closer to the water, so she can smell the salt. "That's the funniest part! No one knows. Not the humans with their telescopes, not even us, skimming the skies. But you know what I think?"

"What?" She covers her mouth, because maybe she wasn't supposed to speak, but the head gull just opens his beak at her. She thinks it looks friendly.

"Souls, my friend. Ninety percent of the universe is just the weight of our souls." He laughs, a bird cackle like an old man's. "You just knew they had to be that heavy, right? Nine times heavier than your body. Ha!"

He raises his wing again and the reds and blues and violets sear her eyes.

She falls back to earth.

--------------------------------------------

He has to physically stop himself, force himself to breathe, so he doesn't give in and try to run to her. It's too dangerous--if he falls now, he will be as literally unable to get up as a fucking seventy-year-old pensioner. The thirty yards separating them might as well be thirty miles, if that happens.

"A goddamn Galahad," he mutters to himself, as he limps slowly forward. And what would be his trusty steed? A scooter, at this rate. The kind with the eye-averting bumper stickers like "Hell on Wheels." File that one under: _death, fates worse than_, right next to anal enemas and Veronica not being--

He walks faster.

--------------------------------------------

Third pill. Everything is black. No colors reverberate, nothing reaches her eyes. Black--true black, not the kind that's in this fall season and out next spring--is the absence of light. Wherever she is, it's a recess so deep she doesn't think any light has ever reached it.

"What do you wish for most?"  
His voice reverberates through the inkblot darkness. Fear grips her, vise-like and uncertain. Her answer seems important, but she isn't sure what to say. Childhood wishes, maybe? Wings, bigger boobs, a mother who doesn't come drunk to birthday parties. But she's not a child anymore, is she? Is she an adult? What are adult wishes?

She can feel sweat forming around her temples, under her arms, but she can't see, and she's irrationally afraid that if she tries to raise her hand to wipe it away, she'll discover her body isn't there at all. Has it happened already? So soon?

She's frozen, terrified, and alone in a lightless black.

"What do you wish for most?"

Again, his disembodied taunt pierces her skull with that unanswerable question. Fear chokes her, runs down her nerves like fire, like a surge of electricity that could end everything and abandon her in the darkness.

And then the answer is there, clear and obvious as his voice.

"What do you wish for?" he asks

"I want the colors back."

--------------------------------------------

She's alive. At first, that's enough.

He drops to the sand beside her, jarring everything, but his body seems to have finally gotten around to releasing some handy endorphins and he doesn't feel it as much as he should.

He grabs her shoulder with his left hand, but although she's sitting up, she's far away. The bottle is sitting in her hand and just by looking at the level of the remaining pills he can tell she hasn't taken that many.

Still, she's small. How many would it take?

He's trying to pry the bottle from her clenched fingers when she jerks and gasps.

"You're here," she says. The wonder in her voice seems more appropriate to angelic visitation than a pain-addled ex-boyfriend, but he won't deny a similar joy.

He tugs on the bottle and she lets them go.

"How many did you take?" he asks, pouring the remaining contents into his palm.

"Three."

He stops and stares at her. "Three. _Three_?"

"I thought..."

He starts to laugh. It's not that he doesn't know it's inappropriate, but it's too funny in an ironic, crazy way not to laugh. "Three," he repeats, incredulous. "A thousand dollars of psychedelic shrooms and three fucking vicodin."

Her movements are slow and a little tentative, but she's still in a fairly lucid state. Lucid enough to get indignant, anyway. "What? What is it?"

He pours the remaining pills back into the bottle and dry swallows three.

"You," he says, planting the bottle in the sand between them, "are a lousy suicide. You can't OD on mushrooms, Veronica. And three vicodin _might_ be enough to kill a cat. Next time you want to kill yourself, at least ask for some advice."

"Since when did you become the suicide expert?"

"Hey, at least _my_ attempt might have worked."

"Sorry, I didn't have a gang handy to beat me...oh, god."

She stares at the sand between her legs and he can tell just from the sound of her breathing that everything is starting to overwhelm her again.

She tried to kill herself. She might have done it in a spectacularly incompetent way, but the fact that she thought of it at all means that things were much worse than he had ever allowed himself to think. Allowed, of course, because the signs were all there. She had probably been thinking about it ever since that night, and at every chance he had to ease the distance between them, show her some inkling of forgiveness, he put up another wall.

It isn't his fault that she betrayed him, that he nearly died, that even the sight of her is enough to terrify him. Maybe it isn't even his fault he still loves her. But it's absolutely his fault that he let it get in the way. That he didn't see what he should have known was coming.

That he almost let her die.

"You should leave, Logan," she says quietly.

"Not a chance. But feel free to continue." He picks up the bottle and drops a pill into his hand. "I'd say you need at least four more to do the job."

She stares at him. "You're helping me kill myself?"

"I can't stop you. Here, take it."

She holds the pill awkwardly in her hand, staring at it as though it holds some cosmic truth. Logan pours out two more.

"What are those for?" she asks.

"Oh, they're mine. I figure I'm a lot taller than you, so two ought to be equivalent."

"But you just took three. Isn't that dangerous?"

"That's the hope."

He watches as she gets it--her emotions are so unusually clear. He can see her fear, her anger. "You can't kill yourself, Logan."

"And you can?"

"I...you don't understand...I _can't_ live...I don't deserve it."

"Fascinating, but irrelevant. Go on, take it."

She actually seems panicked when she looks at him now, but he forces himself not to react.

"I can't. Not if you'll take two more. I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll die!"

"You know, not caring about things like that has to be the greatest perk of _being dead already_."

She's crying like she did that night in the car, like she has no idea she's doing it. "I almost killed you once. I can't do it again. _Please leave_."

"No, you don't get it. If you kill yourself, I swear on my mother's grave I will not last the day. I couldn't survive without you anyway. Why prolong the agony?"

"Are you threatening me?"

He shakes his head. "Too complicated. You can do whatever you want. But I swear I will pull a fucking Romeo if you die."

She glares at him, looking for all the world like she wants to kill him herself, but then she abruptly turns away and starts to laugh.

"You're such a drama queen," she says.

"Runs in the family. Along with a thing for flashy exits."

"Your voice turns gold when you're telling the truth," she says, and tosses the pill into the ocean.

--------------------------------------------

He found her. And she knows it's real Logan because he touched her face and he was so scared. Not-Logan wanted her to die. She's so happy the real one doesn't.

She's been out here for hours. The sun is setting, and she's never seen something so spectacular. All the colors are so clear and they seem to wiggle and burst into a thousand different others. Their own rainbow.

"What are we going to do?" she asks. The silence between them is warm and familiar, like his olive shirt, but it grows tighter as soon as she speaks.

"Do you want to be with me?" he says, finally.

She doesn't look at him. "I think about you. It sort of takes everything over. You know..."

"Love's a bitch," he says, and she thinks of Not-Logan and shivers.

"But I understand if you won't...I mean, if you can't..." He waits for her to say it, and finally she manages, "forgive me."

His sigh is filled with the bruised purple and black, so intense this time she can see it's crossed the line into physical pain. Her stomach clenches. She knows what his answer will be.

Except, it isn't. "I can," he says. "I do."

She turns to him. His eyes are bloodshot, like he might want to cry, or maybe he's just exhausted. How the hell did he walk over the sand, anyway? But, the funny thing about his voice. It _sounded_ perfectly normal, but it looked shiny and brittle, with too much of an undertone of betrayal.

She wanted to see the colors, didn't she? And they're telling her he's lying.

"Logan..."

But he mistakes the source of her desperation. "We can try, Veronica."

And there's just enough gold in there--a sliver, maybe, a tiny vein--for her to pause. Maybe eventually, if she tries, the gold will get bigger. Even when the shrooms wear off and the colors fade, she'll be able to tell. Maybe the agony he feels when he looks at her and remembers what she did will lessen.

"Do you love me?" she asks.

Maybe this will end in disaster, an attempt to put together what she's irretrievably shattered. But there's love in his eyes, behind the pain, and she's wanted it for so long, so badly that when he embraces her she starts to cry.

"He's lying, you know," Not-Logan whispers in her ear. "He can't forgive you. Being with you will tear him apart."

But for now, touching him, smelling his shirt (the hotel must use a different detergent, but it's nice too), feeling his lips in her hair...

For now, she's willing to believe.

END

More notes: I am officially the most unreliable fanfic author ever. I'm sorry for not writing more of Bright, and I promise I haven't forgotten about it. This one's been floating around my head for too long and I had to try it. Not sure if I succeeded. In good news, though, A Feather's Weight won second place in the Pirate Pride Awards angst category! And that's some stiff competition in VM land, too ;) Let me know what you think...really. I'm almost afraid of posting this.


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